A Western Pilgrim in India by Shiloh

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Travelogues
A Western Pilgrim in India – 3

Bodhgaya

In the dry season, the River Phalgu is reduced to a thin stream meandering across a wide sandy plain which is completely inundated during the monsoons. Known as the Nairanjana River in the days of the Buddha, it was along these banks that Gautama accepted a bowl of curds from the maiden Sujata and applied his re-acquired strength to the night of meditation which would culminate in his awakening.

I walked into town to buy some twine. I needed some to send a package. The shopkeeper knew English and offered me grapes. It was midday and the heat was coming on as he motioned me into his shop. I followed him up a few flights of stairs. Soon we were sitting in the open air up on the third floor of a small brick building near the central market, gazing through the unfinished wall over the temporary desert of the Phalgu to a rocky hill where Shakyamuni spent six years doing ascetic practices; Mount Pragbodhi. Tradition has it that the Buddha considered several sites on this mountain as the possible place of enlightenment, but each time the earth quaked, so he decided to move about four miles southwest into a shady grove on the far side of the river.

Looking eastward at the mass of Mount Pragbodhi where Shakyamuni did ascetic practices for six years. On the western side of the Mahabodhi stupa is The Vajrasana or Diamond throne with offerings under a canopy of gold.

In all the world, only one place -- the Vajrasana, the Diamond Throne, the only place firmly rooted to the core of our world-system-could withstand the energies released through the transformative event of a Buddha's enlightenment. While the descriptions in the Abhidharmakosa-bhasya link the Vajrasana solidly to earth, within the Mahayana traditions the Vajrasana relates to a more comprehensive vision of space and time. In the cosmology of the Kalachakra tantra and the Yid-bzhin-mdzod, the Vajrasana extends far upward above the ground as well as below to the earth's core. Here, shining in space, is condensed a great sun of knowledge -- the teaching of all the enlightened ones, carried by an uprising fountain of energy through the infinite vastness of space.

After sharing the view and a chillum with Misree Lal, a sixty year old shopkeeper who lives in the bazaar at Bodhgaya, he began to tell me what it had been like here during his early life; "Both my parents died when I was about ten. I lived in this house with my sister. It was smaller then, just the room that serves as my shop now. I had a horse and a small cart and I would haul things to and from Gaya to earn our money. The jungle was thick around the main temple and many Buddha statues and stupas were buried deep in mud and covered with creepers."

Monks had taken many images and hid them in the bush when the Islamic invasions began. And the Phalgu had occasionally flooded its banks, sometimes burying the Diamond Throne itself under a few feet of silt, even when Bodhgaya was occupied by Buddhists. Pointing to a decaying mansion over by the riverbed, he continued, "An old Hindu Mahant used to live over there when I was a kid. He was a very powerful man and he always used to hang out around the (Mahabodhi) temple. He was trying to stay in control of the whole area. The first Buddhists that I remember coming here in any number were the Tibetans. That would have been in the early 1960's...."

– Continued Page 4

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